"Moral Degeneracy!"-Ezekiel Gathings

girlie magazines read by 1 in 10 American men

The Harem by Louis Charles Royer  (Dell, 1952)

The House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials (chaired by Ezekiel C. Gathings, D. Arkansas) held hearings in 1952. It was formed to examine how paperback books with lurid covers contributed to moral degeneracy.¹ The committee reported:

“ The so-called pocket-size book which originally started out as cheap reprints of standard works, have largely degenerated into media for the dissemination of artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion, and degeneracy. The exaltation of passion above principle and the identification of lust with love are so prevalent that the casual reader of such "literature" might easily conclude that all married persons are habitually adulterous and all teenagers completely devoid of any sex inhibitions. (Report 3).”

Titles highlighted included:

• Confessions of an Artists’ Model (Quarter Books, 1951);

• The Harem (Dell, 1952);

• Lady of the Evening (Arco, 1952);

• Marijuana Girl (Universal Publishers, 1951);

• She Made it Pay (Arco, 1952);

• The Tormented (Fawcett, 1950);

• Twilight Men (Lion Books, 1950);

• Women’s Barracks (Fawcett, 1950)²

Paperbacks in general were a cause for concern.³ Paula Rabinowitz’s book, American Pulp, unearths the far-reaching political, social, and aesthetic impact of the pulps between the late 1930s and early 1960s.⁴

The cover story in a 1953 issue of America observed:

If the work of the Gathings Gommittee accomplished no more than this—to open wide the fundamental problem of responsibility among the bookmen—it did a job for which all who cherish American freedom under God can be thankful.

The Committee report urges that the Postmaster General be empowered to impound mail, pending legal determination, addressed to anyone selling obscene matter by mail, and that the shipment of obscene matter by any type of carrier ( common or private) be declared illegal. It calls for more consistent enforcement of the existing laws against obscene material and adverts to the problem of the "tie-in" sales of pornographic material with unobjectionable matter. ⁵

1. United States, and Ezekial Candler Gathings. Investigation of Literature Allegedly Containing Objectionable Material: Hearings Before the Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, Eighty-Second Congress, Second Session, on H. Res. Nos. 596 and 597. Washington, D.C.: U.S. G.P.O., 1953.

2. Women's Barracks: The Frank Autobiography of a French Girl Soldier is a classic work of lesbian pulp fiction by French writer Tereska Torrès published in 1950. It was banned in Canada. As of 2005 a total of 4 million copies of the book had been sold in the United States and it had been translated into 13 languages. Smallwood, Christine (August 9, 2005). "Sapphic soldiers." Salon.

3. Speer, Lisa K. 2001. “Paperback Pornography: Mass Market Novels and Censorship in Post-War America.” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 24 (3/4): 153–60; Gertzman, J. (2007). "The Jack Woodford Press: Bestsellers at the Army Base, the Drug Store, and the Tourist Bookstore, 1946-1959". The Journal of Popular Culture. 40, no. 1: 25-48.

4. Rabinowitz, Paula (2014). American Pulp How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street. Princeton University Press.

5. Gardiner, Harold C. “Buck-Passing among the Bookmen. (Cover Story).” America 88, no. 19 (February 7, 1953): 511–13.